Pump.fun releases mobile app

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Solana is in love with memecoins, and it just got a Valentine’s Day gift.

The Solana memecoin launchpad pump.fun released a mobile app this morning, representing the viral platform’s first major update since it disabled livestreams in November. It’s further confirmation that apps users can play with on their phones are becoming table stakes for crypto projects, roughly a month after Donald Trump embraced a mobile memecoin app for his token launch.

Perhaps true to form for a platform initially dubbed 4chan for memecoins, pump.fun mobile is a bit rough around the edges. The app’s onboarding process is quite smooth — I entered my email, and pump created a crypto wallet for me, courtesy of Privy — but I found it hard to land transactions without manually adjusting my priority fee and slippage.

By the time I got my transaction through on a dog-themed Valentine’s Day memecoin, early buyers had already nuked the chart to go invest in fresher tokens, and I was left holding a big bag of worthless dogwifrose.

*Transactions failing as I tried to buy a memecoin called dogwifrose*

The app’s early users seem to be facing some of the same struggles. Pump.fun has a 2.5 star rating on Apple’s App Store and a 2.1 star rating on the Google Play Store (as a note, many of these reviews came before today’s public launch).

“Is it my internet or [is] the pumpfun app kinda slow,” one user asked on X.

Pump.fun going mobile doesn’t seem to be driving much new usage on day one. The platform has seen 27,000 token launches today, according to a Dune dashboard, which is currently down from a range of 48,000-54,000 daily token launches earlier this week.

Still, a mobile app is a longer-term play, and longtime readers of Lightspeed know that we have learned better than to bet against pump.fun’s continued success. A little more than a year after first launching, the platform has generated around $548 million in revenue.

My gut tells me that to take the mantle from Moonshot — the Trump-favored and Jupiter-owned mobile memecoin app — pump.fun will have to fix the mobile transaction landing woes, even if that means giving users slightly worse prices. Retail users hoping to hit a 100x trade likely wouldn’t be too rankled by a few extra percentage points of slippage if that means their transactions are actually making it to the blockchain.

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